'American dream' contest proves no business is small--when it's yours.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: BUSINESS AS USUAL

JENNIFER BACON GREW FRUSTRATED by the lack of nutritious yet tasty pancake mixes for her husband, David, and their five kids. So she came up with her own blend of whey protein, wholegrain flour and real fruit as a sugar substitute.

The result: Flapjacked All-Natural Pancake Mixes, launched in February 2013 and now carried by roughly 1,400 stores.

While David remains a pilot for American Airlines, Jennifer quit her job as an executive with Kimberly-Clark shortly before the unveiling of Flapjacked. It's helped that she was a marketing specialist managing a million-dollar brand, now that she's promoting her own.

The Broomfield couple's aim of getting Flapjacked to "more stores, more consumers and more mouths," got a boost in mid-May when they won the regional "Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream" business pitch contest held at Mi Casa Resource Center in Denver. The program was conceived by Boston Beer Co. founder Jim Koch as a way to give small businesses guidance and capital he says were missing when he started out.

Thus the Bacons secured a spot in Sam Adams' national "American Dream" finals, to be held in December in New York, where they'll vie for $10,000 plus coaching from key Sam Adams personnel.

Flapjacked wasn't the only business pitch that impressed the six judges. Doug Michaels, sporting a T-shirt that said "Eat Like Your Grandcestors" on the back, was named runner-up after pitching his company, Noble Savage, and its frozen Paleo meals. Afterward it was announced that the judges saw enough promise in Michaels' Paleo product line to warrant sending him to New York for the finals, too.

The Shark Tank-style business pitches get most of the attention in the "Brewing the American Dream" program, but there's more to it. Partnering with Accion, the nation's largest nonprofit micro-lender, Sam Adams has provided more than 310 loans to small businesses totaling more than $2.7 million...